


Flames at her Heels

by runobody2



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:04:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1242238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade and fire, pre-canon.</p><p>"That night she dreamt of dragons with roars tearing the skies asunder.  Thousand- foot-tall columns of fire.  A paper boat dusted with cinders, floating on a lake of kerosene.  And herself.  In the dreams, she’s a presence."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flames at her Heels

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ladymercury_10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladymercury_10/gifts).



> Written for an mg ficahon (link: http://kidiots.livejournal.com/28803.html).  
> The prompter was lady mercury_10, and the prompt was "Jade | dragons breathing fire In the backyard at night." (hello lady mercury I noticed you had an ao3 and I'd already cross posted and was editing so now I have officially gifted this to you. woohoo.)
> 
> EDITED 5-29-14.

The first thing she sees when she opens her eyes after the crash is her mom on the ground, body bent at an awkward angle, blood coating her palms. “Mom?” Jade asks, her voice soft and disoriented, stumbling out of the car, tears suddenly materializing in her eyes.  “Mom?  Please wake up, Mommy!”

The last thing she thinks before a neon red diamond splotch engulfs her vision is that _her mother can’t be dead_ , and the last thing she sees is a inexplicable sign by the road reading “End.”

* * *

 

There’s a blistering feeling that settles in the pit of Jade’s stomach the week after her mother dies.  It hurts, most of the time, and feels vaguely familiar and it brings a fevery feeling to the back of her throat.  But it’s something to grasp onto, this new self that she tells herself she’s building.

It’s not the first time.  It happened once before, when she was four or so, one of those memories she can’t really grasp except for maybe a slight warmth at the edge of her consciousness.  In the morning she’d opened her eyes to the smell of toast wafting in from the kitchen, and that _heat_.  She went through the day feeling like she was missing something, and before bed she lit a match in her room after her parents were gone.  Fire wasn’t anything she’d considered before, but she did then, stared at the flame right until it burned her fingers.  She lit the entire book of matches, until her room smelled like smoke, and then she stared disdainfully at the pile.  She’d expected it to give her answers, and it _hadn’t_.

That night she dreamt of dragons with roars tearing the skies asunder.  Thousand-foot-tall columns of fire.  A paper boat dusted with cinders, floating on a lake of kerosene.  And herself.  In the dreams, she’s a _presence_. When she woke up the next morning, the blistering feeling was gone.

* * *

 

It’s not like that this time.  This time, she’s curled around the feeling like a thin red string around a needle, and she feels like she’s fall into a limp, loose tangle if it went away.  This time she lights entire fields on fire, watches as the smoke whirls to the sky with all the prayers she doesn’t voice anymore, and she wants more.  This time, she’s determined to snatch the answers, regardless, and whenever she closes her eyes she senses the ashes against the inside of her eyelids. And she doesn’t ever sleep at night, only lies in bed, waits so hard for the fire to go away that she needs to see it front of her, feel the heat against her skin and know that she’s not alone.

Now every cold wind blows goosebumps onto the back of her neck, as another secret fear drifts up from the bottom of her consciousness, but she keeps her window open anyways. She isn’t sure what she hopes will blow in, or what she hopes will blow out. It’s not dark yet when she blinks, and there’s a cloud of red that she know will chase her in her dreams, and already she hears whispers of  “End,” over and over, like a funeral bell. Jade opens her eyes again, puts on her shoes, decides that there’s a fire to light before she goes to bed tonight.

She can’t sit still in class because she’s afraid that the _blistering_ will come seeping out of her mouth and ears because it’s so overwhelming. The teachers frown at her when she doesn’t really listen, and her classmates and everyone whispers about how she used to be a good girl, but she isn’t now. She used to go to church every Sunday, and even if she didn’t always get good grades, she was always such a sweetheart, and now she wears all black, and she ran out of class and she isn’t sorry. Jade tells herself that she doesn’t mind, that nobody understands anyways. She starts a journal like that,“None of them understand . . . .”

Later, her dad comes back from meeting with her teacher and hugs her and tells her that he misses Mom too, and that Jade has always been a good girl, a strong girl, and she’ll get past this, but she doesn’t believe him. But she makes a snuffly sound and she’s crying, again, because she doesn’t want her dad there at all, she wants her mom, telling her about all the things she’s doing wrong.

* * *

 

She sneaks out of the house back to the place of the crash, and apparently the red diamond she saw wasn’t her imagination at all, because the sign is right there, under the one that does, in fact, say “End.”  It’s nice to know that at least she isn’t delusional, _that_ way.  She never remembers seeing it before, even though it’s a small town, and she’s probably passed it a thousand times (funny, the times you notice some things).  Absently, as she hefts the kerosene she brought, she wonders what it stands for, and what it’ll look like, later, when everything else is on fire

As she watches red flicker into the horizon, smoldering and burning, and embers rise into the night like stars, she decides that sunset is the best time to light fires; when she can replace one light with another. Perhaps her fires are a hundred thousand times, weaker, but it doesn’t seem that way when it is right in front of you, something you can see.  Something you can touch, something you can start.  Maybe it isn’t as strong as the sun at all, but Jade also decides that everyone takes things a little more at face value when faced with flames.

* * *

She found the old dictionary that her dad keeps on the top shelf, navigates to the entry for fire.  “The natural agency or active principle operative in combustion; popularly conceived as a substance visible in the form of flame or of ruddy glow or incandescence,” it reads, and she frowns because it’s not at all right.  She cuts out that page, neatly, folds it up and puts it under her pillow.  Later, she burns it, watches as it browns and crinkles and disappears.  But she left the rest of the book untouched, closing it and hefting it back into its dusty spot on the shelf, imagining all the while that she’s odd that way.

* * *

She understands better, now, she thinks.  Burning- at least the things you burn with a little part of yourself, striking the match, or the slow blistering inside, or any of the other multitudes of ways to burn- isn’t about death, or destruction, or havoc, or fear.  That’s part of it, of course.  But mostly it’s giving up blood and bone and tomorrows, good and bad and maybes, forgetting the future to be brighter today.

Her mother always told her she was bad at planning, anyways.


End file.
